Stuck in a Rut: Mobile Advertising Falls Flat

Increased demand for free content. Bad user experiences. Declining ad revenues. These are just a few of the challenges publishers face when trying to monetize their properties. In order to increase customer loyalty, enhance the experience and drive revenue, publishers need to move beyond basic mobile advertisements.

Mobile advertising begs for fresh, innovative ideas from trailblazers who constantly challenge the status quo. Despite increased content consumption on mobile, consumers view mobile ads as intrusive. As a result, publishers are seeing a decline in ad revenue. According to The Wall Street Journal, its “Digital Network—which includes the Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, and WSJ Magazine—come from non-desktop devices, but mobile accounts for less than 20 percent of the network’s digital ad revenue.”

In fact, I was recently at a conference in NYC and heard a well-known publisher describe a similar problem. The company was seeing a significant decline in traffic from both its mobile website and app. The reason? Visitors left the publisher due to the video ads served that required mandatory consumption ahead of the content. So to address this issue, the publisher turned to an ad-tech startup that offers a more elegant, streamlined ad unit that benefits brands, publishers AND the consumers: the out-of-stream video. These video ads play automatically, but only when people scroll to a point on a web page where they can be seen, thus enhancing the user experience while driving viewability and revenue.

For the 2017 Sprint Accelerator Class, we are looking for savvy ad-tech pioneers to help us solve similar challenges: new, dynamic ad units that offer a win-win-win for the brand, the publisher and the consumer. -Brian Smith, Director of Product & Sales, Pinsight Media

Remember, entrepreneurs don’t predict the future, they invent it. So if you have what it takes to lead the ad tech revolution with the support and expertise from our own homegrown mobile pioneers, Sprint and Pinsight Media, apply today: sprintaccelerator.com.